In general, this was about as good as I was expecting it to be, but not as good as I was hoping it would be. It's hard not to compare it to Three Houses because of the fact that it was such a prolific entry that released on the same console 3 years ago, but on it's own merits this is a genuinely good game that I recommend.

The maps and combat are WAY better than Three Houses and probably the best it's been since Awakening. There are some downright EVIL maps in this game and it was super fun to be challenged like this. Additionally, this is visually LEAGUES better than Three Houses, which isn't too hard, but I think the game looks very pretty and has some excellent 3D cutscenes.

So, this is looking like a slam dunk right? Well.. that's where the game kinda loses me. The story and characters are.. not great? The first 10 chapters were QUITE BAD, and while it does get better, it kinda ends up being a worse version of Awakening's second half. There are a few characters with fun personalities and memorable aspects of their character, and apart from Alear all of their designs are really good, but for the most part, it feels like we're going down a checklist.

So.. yeah, on that front, the game is notably weak, and that is the main major reason why the game is weaker than Three Houses, on top of the game not keeping many of the social sim stuff from that one, which I miss, but it's more of a personal nitpick.

Overall, the gameplay and graphics are really good and quite impressive for a Switch game, but story-wise this game is fairly disappointing. Good, but not great. Though, if the Genealogy of the Holy War remake is as in-depth as Echoes with this graphical style and with all of the QOL features in this game, we might get the perfect fire emblem game VERY soon. But yeah, good shit.

the gameplay is pretty great objectively. but the story/art/music/character design/writing/dialogue is such a downgrade from 3h that it makes me feel deeply aware that i'm rapidly hurtling toward the heat death of the universe every second i spend playing it. like, the rest of it is so unequivocally bad that i feel myself growing exponentially dumber the longer i play it. sure, i may become a tactical genius by the endgame, but what's the use when this is all over and i have the mental capacity of a bowl of soup?

Before Engage was revealed, my biggest hope for a new Fire Emblem game was for it to not just be a carbon copy of Three Houses and be a return to form. Be careful what you wish for.

Fire Emblem Engage is shaping up to be one of the most polarizing games in a series where every game is polarizing on some level. I fall into the camp that does not care for it and I’m putting my extended thoughts on it here just to have them somewhere. This is not meant to demean anyone who enjoys it but rather to explain why I feel the way I do.

I actually do see why a lot of people in the FE spaces I frequent really enjoy this one. Breaking is one of the best mechanics to get added to Fire Emblem in a while, as it gives a nice flow to player phases and makes you have to put more thought into playing around enemy phases. Rounds of combat look absolutely stunning with quite possibly the best 3D animations in the series (Kagetsu’s crit animation gives me life) and other neat touches like the cool subtle effect for hitting someone with bonus damage. Ring abilities can just be incredibly fun to utilize, whether it’s busted stuff like Celica’s warp and Sigurd’s massive movement boost or more situational but still fun to use stuff like Lyn’s copies and Ike’s risk vs reward attack. And there’s plenty of maps that stand as some of the best designed in the series, with chapter 11 being the obvious standout, 17 being a tough but fair gauntlet of six strong boss fights, and 19 having a ridiculous surprise that feels like something from a rom hack but in the best way possible.

Based purely on gameplay, I have more positive things than negative things to say about Engage. But that’s not to say that those negative things don’t exist. There are some parts of the game where the map design falters. The earlygame maps essentially being scripted tutorials is a drag, the Solm arc has a desert rout map, a fog of war map with a dumb gimmick of having to break crates with the Ike ring, and a map with the Corrin ring that feels Rev inspired (derogatory), and there’s plenty of otherwise good chapters that suffer from excessive reinforcements that end up slowing down an already fairly slow game.

I also dislike how units feel in this one. The earlygame units are actively unfun to use and are ridiculously outclassed by any mid to late game unit with the same class. Furthermore, I’m not a fan of the effect rings have on unit feel. Plenty of aspects behind units such as skills and weapon proficiency are locked behind bonds with certain rings so it makes units feel less like actually unique entities and more so just vessels for rings.

Lastly, this may just be my personal preference but I’ve never liked the rewind mechanics that have been in every game since FE15’s turnwheel and they’re arguably at their worst now that you can save mid-battle and effectively give yourself infinite rewind uses. I get why these mechanics are there but they feel redundant with the existence of casual mode and really just take me out of the experience as they remove a lot of the interesting dynamics that permadeath creates. And this is before the assholish design choices that they tend to inspire.

So overall, from a gameplay perspective, Engage is a flawed but fun experience. Base Fire Emblem gameplay activates my neurons on a level that I can’t explain so not fucking it up too much is enough to make me happy. I might even go as far to say that a good chunk of my gameplay issues won’t be as much of a problem when a fair bit of time passes and the meta gets easier to understand. But my main source of issues with Engage is not so much its gameplay as it is its story.

I’m seeing a lot of takes from Engage enjoyers along the lines of “people only hate the story because it’s not as serious.” However, I wouldn’t mind a less serious Fire Emblem story if done well. I genuinely love the cheesy 4kids/saturday morning style English opening and I would look forward to Fire Emblem’s G Gundam equivalent: a weird outlier in the series’ history with the primary appeal of being really stupid in a fun way. Sadly though, Engage fails to capture scenes of true peak fiction like having Holland use a windmill mech or having the protagonist get detained in post apocalyptic Italy and interrogated by having his head shoved into a pizza.
The story just overall feels dry and uninteresting. Alear has the personality of cardboard and the four “lords” that join him don’t get much screen time after their respective arcs so none of them have any chemistry amongst themselves or with Alear in the main story. I’m sure that they have interesting dynamics with each other in the supports but if I shouldn’t have to go out of my way to find character dynamics that should have been there in the first place.

Beyond that, the plot is your standard Fire Emblem fare and almost everything that happens in it is something that has happened several times in the series, whether it’s a possessed ruler who’s the pawn of the main villain, a wyvern riding character who starts out on the villain’s side but defects to your army, or the main villain being a generic purple dragon whose main “Fell Dragon” title is the same as another game in the series’ generic purple dragon. For fuck’s sake, the game’s central theme of “going against what you’re fated to be” and the plot twist associated with said theme were both already done before and better in Awakening. It’s hard for me to enjoy this as a less serious game in the series when it just ends up being the same shit as before but with the most superficial layer of “irony”.

The sad thing is that there’s a handful of times where the less serious tone pays off. Yunaka is a fun twist on the bubbly personalities you see in the series by having a character whose bubbly personality is actually just a way of hiding her criminal past and her introduction chapter where she tries to hide the fact that she stole the ring is a fun dynamic. Alcryst is an entertaining parody of angsty characters like Takumi and his introduction scene cracks me up. Fogado is incredibly charismatic and you can tell that his VA had the time of his life recording for him. But these redeeming qualities are the exception, not the norm.

There’s also several moments where the game tries and fails to do serious emotional beats and its villains are the worst example of this. The game arbitrarily makes villains sympathetic with little build up, presumably because of the perceived notion that sympathetic villains are inherently better. It tries and fails to make you feel bad for the side villain who beats up children multiple times and the other side villain who looks like a DeviantArt user’s edgy Fairy Tail OC and whose primary personality trait is being a sadomasochist. Even worse is that the game waits until the very final chapter to give the main antagonist a backstory and then proceeds to treat their death as a sad moment in a way that feels completely unwarranted.

Finally, I’m not a fan of the way the emblem rings were implemented into the narrative. They don’t feel like the actual characters they were in their home series (although calling Byleth a character is a stretch tbh) but rather feel more like generic collectibles that have the faces of past protagonists attached to them as a marketing gimmick. In the main story, they’ll get a little bit of screen time in their join chapter and then get reduced to doing nothing but giving off exposition for the rest of the game. In the game’s side content, their supports are only two to four lines of dialogue so there’s not much they can add beyond generic advice or “remember this thing from the past game” dialogue.

Now because Engage has spawned gameplay vs story discourse, I’ll just say this: I can enjoy games with bad stories and there’s plenty of FE games that fall into that camp. I’m even in the camp that enjoys Fates: Conquest for its gameplay even if I do understand why some might not be able to. But the way I see it, the more time a story takes up, the more of an impact that said story has on my opinion of a game. Cutscenes are lengthy, even more so than Conquest’s, and the game is becoming notorious for how dragged on death scenes in particular feel. These cutscenes take up a lot of the game’s time so I would prefer for the time spent on them to have good writing. And no, being able to skip cutscenes doesn’t make the issues go away. That excuse doesn’t hold up for games I like (like the aforementioned Fates: Conquest) and it doesn’t hold up here either.

Minor tangent but the victim complex a small but vocal portion of the FE fanbase has for any criticism of this game is pathetic. I totally get it if you enjoy games primarily for gameplay and there’s plenty of cases where I do just that but you have to understand why some people aren’t able to do so. If you get genuinely mad at someone for not liking/being interested in a game primarily because of its story, you are part of the reason why video games aren’t treated as seriously as other forms of art.

I guess to explain my apprehensiveness towards Engage overall in spite of liking the gameplay for the most part is that there’s a feeling of soullessness to it, at least to me. It doesn’t exist to do anything new or interesting and primarily exists to reference pre-existing games. There’s been a fairly common take that Engage has a worse story than Fates. Suffice it to say that I don’t agree with this take. Fates’ story is a level of poorly constructed that is the lowest of low bars to clear and that’s before the mountains of gross shit in it.

However, I can see where this take is coming from, even if I find it disagreeable, to say the least. Fates’ concept of a choice between your birth family or your adopted family was a novel idea, at least at the time. Conquest in particular had an interesting idea of focusing on the flaws of implementing change within the system. Both of these ideas were squandered though, in such a way that resulted in some of the worst writing I’ve ever seen. But while Fates had the issue of trying and failing unbelievably hard, Engage had the issue of not trying at all.

And one last thing that I couldn’t fit in here: Fuck Nintendo/Intelligent Systems for putting in pedophilic romance options and fuck Backloggd for deleting my friend’s review because he told pedophiles to do something to themselves that would make the world a better place.
FREE BATTLEHUNTZ

A silly, cozy, and charming adventure filled with excellent combat mechanics, presentation, and a great use of fan service that was exactly what I wanted and needed from a game celebrating this lovely series. I think that games like Shadow Dragon, Echoes, or Blazing Blade are still my favorites, but this game stands out as something different while still offering what I know and love about FE. It was fun seeing the old faces again, it was fun seeing the new ones, it was fun scraping through some of the tougher fights, it was fun listening to the music on the overworld, it was fun adopting all the cats, it was just pure and simple fun. I had a great time.

Fire Emblem Engage has me somewhat conflicted. On one side you've got some of the best maps in the entire series and gameplay that feels fantastic, but in the other side you've got a very bland story that doesn't have any big standout moments until the last 5 chapters. The characters also aren't very good (with a few exceptions like Diamant, Yunaka, and Panette) and are quickly overshadowed by new units that come in every couple of chapters, making it so getting supports, where you'll find the bulk of the character writing, is harder than it should be.

The difficulty in Hard Mode led to some of the most satisfactory moments I've had playing Fire Emblem. The enemies most of the time know how to punish strategies like dodge tanking and don't fuck around with how they use their own Engage abilities (which they can use multiple times). They also rely on items like warp and entrap staves in order to pick out your characters one by one. In one particular map, I had a 15% Entrap hit Alear and drag them all the way to the boss room, where they then proceeded to get Freeze-locked until one of my characters was close enough to use Rescue.

All of this is to say that Engage forced me to think about different strategies more than every other Fire Emblem game I've played. The game is a fantastic experience if you're in it only for the gameplay, but I can't help but feel like the quality of the story and characters makes Engage feel like a missed opportunity to be one of the best Fire Emblem games out there.

I do have to give props for the quality of the visuals, especially in handheld mode. Probably one of the best looking AAA Switch games by a mile, alongside with a decent soundtrack that boasts some great remixes of previous titles' songs and a few bangers of its own, like Fallen Petals.

Absolutely slaughters the entire series with the sheer amount of options you have gameplay wise; and the fact that the game expects you to use them.

A return to GBA supports so now I don't need every support to be a tonal wreck between either being way too serious and being took for a joke or a joke and took serious.

Decent story for fire emblem standards.

Ivy is peak.
They made maps fun again. They haven't figured it out for so long. Thanks engage. I love you.

I was not optimistic about this game. I was among the many people that initially panned the game for the character designs, and even still don't love them really. But I have done a complete 180 on this game, and I am kind of in love with it now.

- Gameplay: This is the strongest aspect of this game in my mind. I think that this is a nice balance between classic and modern FE, as there is a wide variety of skills and class building without diluting the balance of the game, as there didn't seem to be a steam-roll unit in my hard/classic playthrough, although I didn't really try looking very hard as I was just enjoying myself. Armor Knights got a HUGE buff in this entry which honestly I was down with, and the gap between mounted unit and foot unit efficiency is reduced drastically. Warp skipping is less effective, and ultimately the game uses the emblem mechanic to a really solid degree. Some emblems are just kinda eh, such as Lyn, but others can be ridiculous on the right units, such as Corrin on a covert unit giving Yunaka like 190 avoid or some wild number.
- Visuals: This is hands down the best looking and performing Fire Emblem game. This game is mostly 60 with a few dips here and there, but nothing very significant. The colors look great, and for the most part, the game is gorgeous. Yes, I am still in the camp that a lot of the character designs are pretty bad, but I think there are some really solid ones as well, such as Diamante, Yunaka, Alfred, Kagetsu, etc. I think the anime-ification of this game is way overblown, especially given that the series has been anime basically since its' conception.
- Music: This has to be top 5 switch game soundtracks imo, this game has a fucking insane ost. I think that some of the Engage map themes flop to some extent, but the Firene map theme, the Solm map theme, and Tear Streaked are fucking awesome. All of the reworked classic music goes absolutely insane, I found myself blasting that shit way too loud through my headphones whenever I was doing the trial maps. And last of all, the main theme. Yes, it's very 4kids, but if you just take it at face value and accept that it was made to be campy, it's kinda great. I like it a lot, and have had it stuck in my head for a long time now.
- Characters/Story: Okay, now the praises are going to stop. This is where the game kinda falls short in a lot of regards. Long story short, this game does not have a good story. It has a lot of strange and unpredictable twists, sure, but for just as many, there are very obvious twists that don't really do anything for me, as well as drawn out cutscenes that don't really develop anything in a meaningful way. I was not floored by the story, but I also think that it is far from the worst we've gotten from FE. In my opinion, this game's story is still better than Fates and Sacred Stones, but I feel like I will be alone in that regard. The characters are nothing special, either. I found some of them to be charming, but ultimately, this game falls into the unfortunate trap that most modern FE games do of making a character feel like they have one defining characteristic that shapes most of their supports, and that makes me a little sad. But that being said, they are solid enough in that regard and felt on par with Fates in terms of character writing.

Final comments: Yes, I understand this game is very fanservice-y and might not be what everyone wanted, but I also can appreciate the fact that this is a celebration of Fire Emblem, and it makes me sad that a lot of fans are crucifying it for not being the next step from Three Houses, as I see a lot of people claiming this "is Fire Emblem for people who don't get Fire Emblem" both on this site and on Twitter, which is kind of cringe. Yes, it has its cheesy shounen anime moments, and the story is a little shit, but honestly I had more fun playing Engage than I could have ever expected, and I hope that people give it the credit it deserves. I plan on starting a Maddening playthrough of the game relatively soon, as I heard from others it is actually quite fair unlike Lunatic+ Awakening/Maddening 3H.

+ Fun gameplay
+ Good map design overall
+ Great soundtrack
+ Nice animation/visuals (The cutscenes are great)

- Narrative is on the basic side
- Some design choices are odd (Lack of new game plus for example)
- Supports are a little lacking

Narrative - 7/10
Gameplay - 8.5/10
Design - 8/10
Visuals - 9/10
Sound - 9/10

Rating - 8/10

Honestly, I’m at a low point in my life, so a light hearted Fire Emblem game is all I needed.

The story isn’t amazing. It starts slow, then picks up, then slows back down, then it peaks at Chapter 22 before settling down. When it’s good, it’s so ridiculous and deux-ex machina filled it’s great.

The characters are charming but rather 2 dimensional. Pretty much all of them except Alear and Veyle are useless to the overall story outside of their own individual arcs. Favourites are definitely Alcryst, Diamant, Yunaka and Goldmary.

The gameplay is slow paced, but amazing. It makes fates irrelevant to be honest, as the gameplay was all that game had going for it.

Overall, if this is your first Fire Emblem, you might enjoy it, but Three Houses, Awakening and Scared Stones are probably better.
If you’ve only played Three Houses, lower your expectations as it’s more like a traditional game in the series.
If your first game was Awakening/Fates, you’ll probably get the most out of this, provided you play some of the older games.

Is the game perfect? No. Far from it. Is it fun? Yes. Is that all that matters? YES.

Story: 6.5/10
Visuals: 9/10
Characters: 8/10
Soundtrack: 8/10
Gameplay: 10/10

It's nice to start the year with a delightfully satisfying release from a classic series. Intelligent Systems seems to have learned just about every important lesson they needed to after Three Houses, making this a much more technically sound and tactically interesting title. And that's speaking as someone who liked Three Houses well enough to finish it three times.

The most striking improvement is the presentation. Not only is the rendering cleaner and more stable, but the models and animations and shading and skyboxes, etc. There's a fullness to the appearance and feel of the game this time around that makes it look like the Nintendo first party title it is. FMV cutscenes are plentiful and gorgeous and they seem to have figured out their in-game cutscene systems giving the bulk of the main story more life and weight.

On the downside, the story being presented here has some writing issues. Namely that the dialogue can get pretty corny and I don't feel that the main character gets enough development in the begninning. It's still entertaining enough in a 90s anime sort of way early on and actually pretty well paced, so you can ignore that if you have a little heart. Also — while scattered — there are some moments in the main narrative that are genuinely interesting and the optional bonding conversations are often charming and funny, as usual.

What I was really happy to see, however, was the care and attention put into the combat scenarios. I played on hard and there was a nice consistency to the difficulty. When I went in underprepared it was tricky but doable, leading to some pretty novel tactics on my part. When I theory crafted and honed my party's builds, I was rewarded with the satisfaction of a confident victory — so long as I didn't get careless.

The balance this time around took the opposite approach of Three Houses. There, unit strengths and weakness were downplayed, making more matchups viable with high enough stats. Sword had a base advantage against Axes, but an axe wielder 5 levels over would still probably win. In Engage, you might win if your unit intiates, but on defense they won't even be able to make a followup attack.

Engage introduces a system that I believe is new to the series (I'm not as well versed as I'd like to be), where hitting a unit with their weakness on the weapon triangle(+) will "break" them, disallowing them to make the series standard followup attack for that combat round and whoever attacks them next. I won't go into all of the tactical implications, but it added a subtle layer of depth that the series has needed for quite some time without becoming the "center" of all viable strategies.

The other (in my mind) major change was in how assisted attacks work. Only units with a specific trait (mainly the figther-type classes) can directly contribute to their teammates attacks and it's a standardized value that seems to be dictated entirely by who initiated and who the target is. Conversely, there's more flexibility in who can pile on via unlockable skills, and the enemy units can use this system too (which, if memory serves is new). Bond level bonuses are also more subtle, only contributing directly to hit/avoid chance as far as I could tell. Overall, for me this made death starring your units up into a slow, marching blob much less necessary and thus I felt free to move my units more dynamically.

That last point is further enhanced by the much more creative encounter design in Engage. I won't claim these are the greatest Strategy RPG levels made, and memory tells me that Fates: Conquest was more devious, but most of the levels do a good job of layering environment hazards, traps, and threatening enemies onto tactically interesting map layouts. Many had memorable concepts to them that made them stick in the mind better. You weren't just entering Desert City Battlefield Template #2, you were fighting through a cluttered port storage yard in the dark while a wave of fliers posed to invade from the sea.

Paired with the wonderful music that dynamically changed as it zoomed down to individual battles as they happened and it really was a treat. The less tactically interesting levels also benefitted from the highlights, as with the pacing of the game they served as good cooldown sections.

That brings us to the metagame and progressions elements of the game. I've already made my peace with the series now seemingly permanent inclusion of procedural level grinding missions. It is still a little annoying that I can risk overlelling some characters when I'm trying to get the weaker ones up to par for the main missions, but the aforementioned balance changes help a lot on this front. There's also a "Trial Tower" mode that seems to exist to provide levelled challenges outside of the main story, and even includes network co-op play and a mode to battle copies of other people's armies.

I haven't gotten around to trying any of it, yet, but it sure seemed interesting.

Oh, right. I've forgotten to mention the gameplay change that game is named after. The Emblems and their "engage" abilities. This mechanic definitely becomes one that your strategies will revolve around, and thankfully it does so in a way I found exciting but not overused. I feel it'd be to many words here to explain its function in-depth, but the short of it is that it gives your units bursts of additional abilities that can let you pull off some really nifty stuff. And what makes it especially fun is that it rarely plays out like an instant-win button. They more provide options you might not have had but they come with their own risks. And even when they don't, their inherit time limits mean you can find yourself in hot water a few turns down the road if you're still in the thick of it when that time is up.

They're also just very visually pleasant and the nostalgia factor of including old heroes is nice.

There's more I could say on the gameplay, but I'm probably already too in the weeds as it stands, so I'll wrap up with a mention of the "life sim" mechanics available between missions. They're far more optional and less time consuming than the last three games, but technically there's about as many as 3H. So for people who enjoy that as a brian break between battles or as a way to get more screentime with the cast, it still serves its role.

Overall, Fire Emblem Engage was a worthy entry in long running series that exceeded my modest expectations and was consistently.... engaging.... from start to end. I highly recommend to any fans of strategy RPGs, however I can't speak to how interesting it would be for newcomers to the genre.

I'm one of those Classic Mode, no deaths allowed kind of players.